"Corporate Voice": Poetic Personation and Political Theology in Early Modern England 726 views

My project aims to revitalize the study of personification (personation), a trope of verbal attribution that defined striking developments in early modern poetics and political thought. Personation, which encompasses speaking as another on stage as well as for another as a proxy, raises complex political-theological questions about presence, identity, legitimacy, and agency. Concentrating on fictions of personhood, ritual and rhetorical speech acts, and the surrogacy of nonhuman material objects, I argue that early modern authors like Sidney (in the New Arcadia), Spenser (in Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale and The Shepheardes Calender), and Shakespeare (in the Henriad) turned to personation in responding to contemporary political-theological crises, shaping a discussion of representation and delegation within their fictions that influenced later political philosophers such as Hobbes.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Early Modern Literature; English Renaissance; William Shakespeare; Edmund Spenser; Philip Sidney; Henriad; The Second Part of Henry IV; The Shepheardes Calender; Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale; Arcadia; Personation; Prosopopoeia; Personification; Persona; Representation; Political Theology; Rhetoric; Poetics; Thomas Hobbes; Ernst Kantorowicz; The King's Two Bodies; 16th and 17th Century Literature

English

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2022-04-30